I'm a native New Mexican, a parent of two children who attended
New Mexico schools through high school, and a scientist (in
physics/math) with dozens of scientific and technical publications,
including a cover article in Scientific American (December 1980).

I'm writing to encourage you to adopt the final draft of the
proposed New Mexico Content Standards and Benchmarks for Science, as
is, at the regular Board meeting (August 27-29). I have reviewed the
standards, and they are something New Mexico can (and should) be
proud of. I am pleased to add my endorsement to that of other
individuals and groups supporting the new standards, including the
Fordham Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the American
Institute of Biological Sciences, the New Mexico Conference of
Churches, and many more.

The critics of the new standards, especially the Intelligent
Design Network of New Mexico (IDnet-NM), have said much about needing
to change the standards to achieve "fairness" and "integrity." The
standards are already fair and honest, and do not need further
revisions. It's not "fair" when you've been patiently waiting your
turn in a long line, and someone takes "cuts" in front of you right
before you get to the teller or checker to do your business. What
IDNet wants to do - dictate science curriculum for supposed "new
science" that has not been published, debated, fought over, and
finally accepted in the scientific community - is the same as taking
"cuts." In this situation, it's the students of New Mexico who will
be cheated. And, I find it ironic that the same people clamoring for
"integrity" are the ones who routinely misrepresent scientific ideas
and facts in an effort to promote their anti-evolution-at-all-costs
ideology.

If you are tempted to support "compromises" offered by IDNet-NM,
please be advised that there is no compromise for these people. For
example, when the Ohio Board of Education felt compelled to
specifically insert the phrase "The intent of this indicator does not
mandate the teaching or testing of intelligent design" in Ohio state
standards in December of last year, Jody Sjogren of IDNet-Ohio turned
this around by declaring "We're the first state to have the words
intelligent design included."

Please don't let IDNet-NM muddy the academic waters for years to
come. Please send a clear message to teachers and students - that,
even if they might not agree with evolution, they're going to have to
learn about it in order to be scientifically literate.

With best regards,

David E. Thomas

All Eyes on New Mexico's
Board of Education August 27th-29th...

The New Mexico State Board of Education will decide on August
27-29 on whether to adopt new science standards developed over
the last year. Here is a list of groups supporting the new standards,
and those opposing:

"...the claim that one irreducibly-complex system might
contain another is self-contradictory. To understand this, we need
to remember that the entire point of the design argument, as
exemplified by the flagellum, is that only the entire biochemical
machine, with all of its parts, is functional. For the intelligent
design argument to stand, this must be the case, since it provides
the basis for their claim that only the complete flagellum can be
favored by natural selection, not any its component parts.
However, if the flagellum contains within it a smaller functional
set of components like the TTSS [Type III Secretory
System], then the flagellum itself cannot be irreducibly
complex  by definition. Since we now know that this is
indeed the case, it is obviously true that the flagellum is not
irreducibly complex. ... As an icon of anti-evolution, the
flagellum has fallen."

"The "No Child Left Behind" Education Act does not call
for the teaching of "Intelligent Design." The Santorum
Language does not Appear in the Final Version of the Education
Bill After Santorum's language was deleted from the bill,
he was able to insert a watered-down version of his language in
the explanatory report of the conference committee. Here is where
the language about evolution is located, right on page 703.
However, a committee report, even when it is accepted by the
Congress, is not a bill. It was not sent to the President's desk
for signature, and it is not part of Public Law 107-110. Case
closed. Committee reports simply do not have the force of law. The
new Education Act simply does not require the teaching of
"Intelligent Design."

The NCLB law itself contains strict prohibitions against
the federal government mandating academic achievement standards.
New Mexico and all states are empowered to establish their own
academic standards without federal government intrusion. From the
law itself, Title I, Part I, page 55, it states: "Part I contains
several provisions intended to ensure state and local flexibility
in certain areas. It prohibits the federal government from
mandating specific instructional content, academic achievement
standards and assessments, curriculum, or program of
instruction...."

Specifically: on 1619 (195 of 670 pages total) of PART
IGENERAL PROVISIONS

"Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize
an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate,
direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or
schools specific instructional content, academic achievement
standards and assessments, curriculum, or program of
instruction."

On Page 1897-8 (473-4 of 670 pages total) of PART CGENERAL
PROVISIONS

"Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize
an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate,
direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or
schools specific instructional content, academic achievement
standards and assessments, curriculum, or program of instruction,
as a condition of eligibility to receive funds under this
Act."

OBSERVATION, EXPERIMENT, AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL
EVIDENCE

IDnet-NM insists that new science standards for New Mexico would
"lead students to believe that reliable conclusions can be reached
on the basis of circumstantial evidence alone without evidence
derived from observation and experiment. ... to teach students
that they can draw reliable scientific conclusions based on
circumstantial evidence ... compromises the integrity of science and
makes a mockery of critical thinking. ..."
(Source: http://www.cesame-nm.org/announcement/IDnet_OPEd.pdf)

From the National Academy of Sciences, "Teaching Evolution and the
Nature of Science, Chapter 3: Evolution and the Nature of
Science," here's a definition of science:

"Science is a particular way of knowing about the world.
In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be
inferred from confirmable datathe results obtained through
observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other
scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is
amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot
be based on empirical evidence are not a part of science.

Circumstantial evidence is evidence of facts from which
inferences or can be drawn. ... In the case of a murder, examples
of circumstantial evidence include:

The fact that the accused had an intense dislike of the
victim

The fact that the accused behaved in a bizarre and
suspicious way after the offence

The fact that he or she lied about his or her alibi

The fact that he or she was in the area at the time that
the offence was committed

The fact that the defendant's blood or DNA corresponds to
blood or DNA found on the victim's body.

The general rule is that circumstantial evidence is admissible.
However, the courts are careful when the only evidence in a case
is circumstantial evidence.

Circumstantial evidence must be closely examined and it must be
looked at cumulatively. In other words, a court would be
very slow to convict a defendant on the basis of one
piece of circumstantial evidence alone, for example, the fact
that his or her fingerprints were found at the scene of the
crime.

However, if there are a number of different strands of
circumstantial evidence, taken together, they have more
weight. For example, in a theft case, if the defendant was
seen in the area at the time of the theft, his or her fingerprints
were found at the scene of the crime and if he or she was later
found with a large sum of money that he or she could not explain,
then the court would be more likely to convict the accused.

Conviction upon circumstantial evidence is proper
if court is convinced that defendant is guilty beyond
reasonable doubt.

2. Criminal Law-Circumstantial Evidence-No Actual Witness

Conviction may stand even though no person actually
witnessed crime.

NUMBER OF INSTANCES OF
DIRECT OBSERVATIONS/MEASUREMENTS OF EVOLUTION: UNTOLD MILLIONS

"Every new fossil found, every newly discovered plant
or animal, every anatomical or molecular comparison of various
life forms, is a 'repeat observation' of evolution."
David E. Thomas, "Bad Science Sneaks Into Schools," Albuquerque
Journal, August 31, 1996.

NUMBER OF INSTANCES OF
DIRECT OBSERVATIONS/MEASUREMENTS
OF "INTELLIGENT DESIGN":ZERO

In an article by Richard John Neuhaus from First Things
121, March 2002, Neuhaus writes "With respect to the origin and
complex development of life forms, clear thinking begins with
recognizing what we do not know. Dembski puts it nicely: 'An
argument from ignorance is still better than a pipe dream in which
youre deluding yourself. Im at least admitting to
ignorance as opposed to pretending that youve solved the
problem when you havent.' 

Progress in science consists of the development of better
explanations for the causes of natural phenomena. Scientists can
never be sure that a given explanation is complete and final. Yet
many scientific explanations have been so thoroughly tested and
confirmed that they are held with great confidence.

The theory of evolution is one of these explanations. An
enormous amount of scientific investigation has converted what was
initially a hypothesis into a theory that is no longer questioned
in science. At the same time, evolution remains an extremely
active field of research, with an abundance of new discoveries
that are continually increasing our understanding of exactly how
the evolution of living organisms actually occurred.

Can IDers Compromise? Sorry,
NO!

From Ohio.com, Wed, Dec. 11, 2002

School board approves science guidelines that
include evolution

LIZ SIDOTI
Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio - After months of debate and a last-minute
change, Ohio has new science standards that take a stronger stance
on evolution and allow students to fully critique its legitimacy.

Because of concerns about what topics would be covered in such
an analysis, the board added a last-minute disclaimer before
voting Tuesday that the standards do not require the teaching or
testing of the alternate concept of "intelligent design."

The vote was 18-0, with one member absent.

...

Supporters of intelligent design also claimed victory because
the standards still permit teachers to examine intelligent design.
They also say that the inclusion of the words "intelligent design"
in the disclaimer simply helps legitimize it in mainstream
society.

"We're the first state to have the words intelligent design
included," said Jody Sjogren, co-founder of the national
Intelligent Design Network and director of its Ohio
office.

WHAT ABOUT THE HUNDREDS OF SCIENTISTS "OPPOSING DARWINISM" ?

IDers, and IDnet-NM in particular,
deliberately and repeatedly confuses the concept of "evolution" - the
descent of many varied species from common ancestors - with the
concept of "Darwinism' which is the gradual unfolding of variations
by natural selection espoused by Charles Darwin in 1859. IDnet-NM
purposely equates any and all criticisms of Darwin's original work
with criticisms of the idea of
"evolution" itself.

In the preface and first chapter of his book, Patterns
and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, [Robert] Carroll
makes some extraordinary statements about pervasive problems in
the history of life constructed from examination of the fossil
record compared to the history predicted by Darwin. He even
criticizes textbooks for perpetuating this false history. Here is
Carroll.

"Instead of showing gradual and
consistent change through time, the major lineages appear suddenly
in the fossil record, already exhibiting many of the features by
which their modern representatives are organized."

"..few fossils are yet known of
plausible intermediates between the invertebrate phyla, and there
is no evidence for the gradual evolution of the major features by
which the individual phyla or classes are characterized"

"Progressive increase in knowledge of
the fossil record over the past hundred years emphasizes how wrong
Darwin was in extrapolating the pattern of long-term evolution
from that observed within populations and species."

Carroll indeed makes such statements. But, he was talking about
the state of evolution as it was known in Darwin's time -1859. In the
fourteen decades since, we've made many new discoveries. Carroll
points out that continental drift has had a huge impact on the course
of evolution over time scales of hundreds of millions of years, yet
it was not even accepted until about 1960. Yes, there are indeed gaps
in the fossil record, but these can be caused by several mechanisms,
including migration and mutations in regulatory genes. If a species
evolves in one region, and then migrates to a new region, the fossil
record would show a "sudden appearance" of the species in the second
region. For example, future New Mexican scientists might uncover
evidence of a "sudden appearance" of Africanized Killer Bees in New
Mexico, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The bees evolved,
all right, but in Africa, not in America. Their "sudden appearance"
in New Mexico is no more mysterious than the "sudden appearance" of
distant relatives during holiday seasons.

Carroll also discusses how mutations in regulatory genes -
genes that control other genes, like the homeobox (Hox) genes - can
produce massive changes in body plans, using conventional hereditary
mechanisms. Carroll indeed takes issue with Darwin's predictions,
because these were primarily derived from observations of living
creatures alone, and did not take into account what we've learned
from hundreds of millions of years worth of fossil data. Carroll
writes in his preface "Although
Mendelian and population genetics are important for understanding the
mechanics of evolutionary change, behavior and external factors of
the physical and biological environment are more significant in
determining the rate, direction, and nature of change over long
periods of time."

While Robert Carroll finds much to criticize in Darwin's 1859
formulation, what does he think of the concept of evolution itself?
In his first chapter, he writes "Most
important, all organisms are linked to one another by a common
genetic heritage. All the millions of living species are the product
of continuous evolutionary change since their origin from a common
ancestry more than 3.5 billion years ago. Soon after the
publication of The Origin of Species, nearly all biologists
acknowledged the basic facts of the evolutionary history of life, but
the significance of natural selection and other evolutionary
processes are still subject to serious scientific
debate." He goes on to say that the controversy is over
the mechanisms of evolution - how it proceeds, not if
it proceeds.

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying
principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence
is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things
share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate scientific
debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no
serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural
selection is a major mechanism of evolution. It is scientifically
inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist
pseudoscience, including but not limited to "intelligent design,"
to be introduced into the science curricula of the public
schools.

The Catch: every single one of the over 200 scientists
endorsing this statement is named "Steve" or a variant thereof.
Details are here: